Context
- Customer: Dura-Line
- Project: Single Supplementary Site (sales support information)
- Market: Manufacturing
- Technologies: SAP ECC, SAP BODS, SAP CPI DS, Databricks (Azure), MS Power BI, MS Teams/ SharePoint
- Time: 2025
For Dura-Line’s customers, two things are important: getting the product soon, and getting it at the agreed time. For Dura-Line, agreeing on an acceptable delivery time and sticking to that, is therefore extremely important.
For that reason, a daily process was in place to manually assess lead times for new orders.
The result of this effort is traditionally a point of contention between the sales teams (pushing for lower lead times) and the manufacturing teams (pushing for enough time to fulfill).
Requirement summary
The lead time for the extrusion products (ducts for communications networks) needs to be calculated on a daily basis, and supplied to the sales teams for use in the quotation- and ordering process.
It must be based on the open order volume and manufacturing capabilities, and -capacities of the North-American plants (in East-US, East-Canada, Central-US, Western-US and Western-Canada).
Solution summary
Calculating lead time per production line
The process starts with collecting the required data:
- Open order volume is ingested into the Databricks Lakehouse, from SAP ECC.
- Per plant, production line capabilities (in pounds) and -capacities are recorded in a SharePoint list., and interfaced to the Databricks Lakehouse.
- Like wise, packaging times (time needed for coiling duct, compiling multiple ducts into a over-sheath, etc.) are recorded per plant in a SharePoint list and interfaced to the Databricks Lakehouse.
The open order volume is converted to pounds and allocated to the lines, according to capability (diameter range and specialty-capability), and then by optimized production times (by capacity in pounds).
It is done in such a way that lines with special capabilities (such as applying an inner lining, or a copper wire for above-ground detection) are assigned to produce specialty orders, before being assigned to produce more generic product.
Getting the minimal lead time
The above calculation produces an optimized lead time per production line, per plant.
The result is used to query the minimal lead time per plant, per product type, where product type is determined by duct diameter, inner- or outer- lining, detection wire, wall-thickness, inner wire, striping and other features.
The query result is presented to the sales team, to find the minimal lead time for a selected product in a selected region, including packaging leadtimes, in a MS Power BI dashboard. Additional notes are included from a SharePoint list into the PowerBi report directly.
